Perry and I just chatted. We want the four of us (Perry, mouser, 4wd, and me) to read through the novel as a consumer seeking reading pleasure. When we finish, we each wanna rate it firstly just purely in terms of whether we found it to be a pleasurable read. Then we'll clean up any remaining technical points.

Shane Etter is reading the final draft, from a macro rather than micro (scanning for typos) perspective. He will let me know if he enjoys it. I think he will, because Chapter 14 of my novel is all about a setting/scene that featured in his book Bottom Dwellers. An accidental, but happy, coincidence.

Beta-readers, there is a misplaced passage in Ch 21 beginning "Mephord and Jaimie entered the Sewage Treatment Cavern." and ending "Then, “Good shooting, Jaimie.” It shouldn't occur until Ch 22 and has been removed from Ch 21 in the manuscript.

Beta-readers, we've identified hyphenation used often where it shouldn't be, sometimes instead there should be a double word, or two separate words. I will also be going through and correcting the misuse of the word 'and' as in "one hundred and thirty". Also, numbers between 21-99 should be hyphenated unless evenly divisible by ten. Will fix.

Up to 71 Likes on my author page (see sig) from 54 last week. Trying to build awareness/buzz. So far, 68 ppl have "said" they're gonna buy the novel. Then there are the genre-feeders who buy anything new in a particular genre. Submitted a request (not actual ebook) to two review sites today. One is offering me to guest blog about the experience we've all had collaborating!

For those following this thread, I emailed Perry and 4wd tonight and outlined our timetable for getting through with final edits by deadline. In brief, I'm asking them to consider the Prologue through Chapter 8 done, and to concentrate on the remaining chapters with an eye out just for these things: tautologies, logic errors, typos, and other grammatical errors.

Then, lf we get the book drudged for those bottom-feeders, we can go back and leisurely tweak phrasing, and do other polishing. The goal for right now, however, is to rid the book of any remaining outright errors prior to my deadline.